quality assurance

Articles

Rigorous practices to reinforce performance and resilience, and testing continuously for these aspects, are great ways to catch a problem before it starts. And as with many aspects of testing, the quality of the performance practice is much more important than the quantity of tests being executed. Here are seven simple tips to drive an efficient performance and resilience engineering practice.

From the way we look at software, evaluate risks, think about complexity, design our test approach and strategy, and help to release a stable product to the customer, technology has had an influence on how we test software. And that influence will only continue as technology advances. On a high level, here are five key things we’re already seeing that are going to shape the future of software testing.

With the rise of technology like AI and practices like DevOps, teams everywhere are looking for ways to speed up testing without sacrificing quality. The articles in 2017 reflect that, with the most popular topics being test automation, testing machine learning systems, next-generation exercises, and the future of software testing. If you're looking for cutting-edge testing techniques, check out this roundup.

When can a bug report be considered redundant because it is already reported in the bug management system? If you ask the developers, if two bugs are caused by the same mistake in the code, it’s enough to report one of them. But Michael Stahl has good arguments from a tester's perspective about why it's better to err on the side of over-reporting bugs.

Better Software Magazine Articles

QA testers often take on more of a role than just testing software code. When the team needs help, QA should lend a hand in assisting with business analysis, customer communication, user experience, and user advocacy.

As if working at Lego isn’t fun enough, Sherri Sobanski delights in finding new ways to test. Faced with a situation requiring a complete product redesign, she shares the route her team took to overhaul testing.

QA is often considered that lonely department of testers whose job is to find defects before the customer does. It's not always glamorous, but QA deserves to be recognized as a key cog in the testing machine. To achieve business goals, it is Susan Bradley's view that the QA process needs to be embraced throughout the entire software development lifecycle.

Interviews

Greg Paskal, test automation lead at Ramsey Solutions, talks about data lakes and how to effectively use data visualization. Done well, data visualization should help practitioners, managers, and stakeholders easily consume, understand, and act on the information the visual displays.

In this interview, Kenneth Merkel of CA Technologies explains how service virtualization has changed the way organizations handle their testing. He also details how improved coverage can lead to better quality, a happier QA team, and remove any blockers preventing you from release.

In this interview, Anj Dubey, director of performance engineering for McGraw-Hill Education, discusses the need to shift left and embed your performance engineering into your CI/CD pipeline in order to ensure that every line of code is going to meet your performance requirements.

Conference Presentations

When delivering agile software development projects and conducting quality assurance and testing assessments, it often seems that “solving the testing problem” doesn’t solve “the quality problem.” The testing problem is much broader than just code quality, testing tools, automation...

When the atmosphere is hostile to QA, and yet the demands on the QA Team are increasing, how do you transform a team where everything is tested and deployed manually, to an organization that delivers great software multiple times a day? Where do you start and how do you create the strategy for implementing Continuous Testing? Join David Lumpkin as he shares his company's journey to answer these questions and the team's evolution along the way. Over a three-year period, Craftsy went from an environment hostile towards QA, to one that embraces automation and exploratory testing, achieving the right level of coverage for every use case, device and browser. It wasn’t easy though and David shares their experience through many experiments, failures and revisions that finally made Continuous Testing a reality.

There are many crowdsourcing vulnerability discovery techniques available today, making it difficult for testers to choose an approach that finds important vulnerabilities while offering the best bang for the buck. Join Mike Shema as he shares several years of real-world data that will help you understand the different discovery techniques, such as bug bounty programs and scanners, and the best time to use each technique. Mike also will discuss how your approach may change according to your lifecycle, and ways to think about integrating security within that process. You'll see how metrics play a pivotal role in determining where to focus your time in order to work as efficiently as possible while achieving the best results. Learn three key measures that help drive risk-based decisions while balancing your team’s efforts with the stakeholders’ need for information.

In the shift toward “continuous everything” in software development and delivery, we know that testing and testers must foster and support innovation within technology. Many of us just don’t know how to gauge that shift or, more importantly, know what needs to happen within our role to make it happen. Melissa Tondi explores the future of testing, what skills we should have/develop to ensure we are prepared for that future, and the traits of a quality engineer (QE)—where she believes many tester roles are shifting. Melissa walks you through what an innovation-oriented QE organization looks like, how she has shifted several traditional QA/testing teams to become quality engineers with balance between traditional specialist roles and more generalists—all while keeping efficiency and innovation at the forefront.

Women Who Test connects women software professionals around the world – allowing them to share testing ideas and solutions while helping each other thrive and advance their careers.

The community is an ever-expanding group of engaged, and encouraging women who are stepping up to start meet-ups and create local chapters. Explore the existing local chapters and consider sharing and joining! WomenWhoTest.com